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Summary: Invisible cities - visible genius
Review: Calvino is well-known for stretching the form of the novel, and Invisible Cities is certainly innovative in this respect. Somewhat in the style of '1001 Nights', the reader is offered a series of one page descriptions of the cities Marco Polo has visited on his travels. Interspersed with this are conversations between Polo and his patron, Kublai Khan. The Khan has not seen these places because his empire is simply too big. In this sense the cities are invisible. However, it becomes increasingly likely that Marco Polo hasn't seen them either. Is he describing nothing but different facets of his home town, Venice - or is he making the whole thing up?Wherever the truth may lie, each city Polo describes is simultaneously fantastic and true. Each page captures the magical reality of urban life, in a way that no 'realist' account ever could. Not only is this a great novel, it is a novel all town planners and architects should be forced to read. Calvino reminds us that we will only ever live in cities as grand as our imaginations. What we need is to imagine more vividly.
Rating: 
Summary: subtle, rich, textured literative patterns
Review: So here I was, flying north, thinking about themes such as axioms, storytelling, pattern recognition, and facilitation from the grandest, most broad vantage point. Before me, this short book of short stories based upon conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Invisible Cities is very simple on the surface. It contains several series' of short stories - 1 to 3 pages in length - that chronicle Polo's excursions into cities throughout the domain of The Khan. The stage is Khan's garden, where Polo has been summoned to report on his journies. Each series of stories is bound by a brief contextual passage, usually a dialogue between Polo and Khan about the nature of Polo's journies and their meaning. From this simple structure, Calvino weaves a rich tapestry of patterns, some obvious (take a look at the table of contents) some very subtle (read between the lines when you read the passages that bridge one section to the next). Calvino is a masterful story teller - with an uncanny abililty to create space, setting, scene and mood. I found Invisible Cities a personal, intimate read. Marvelous.
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Summary: The journey of all journeys
Review: I will not go on a trip without this book. It provides insight and intrigue each time i pick it up.
I've actually lost my original copy and am on the search for the next. The tales are like day dreams drifting in and out of the air with a gentle breeze. They lift and entice the senses. Get this in your collection and begin your armchair travels as soon as possible.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating read, not to be missed
Review: This is quite possibly the most striking novel I've had the pleasure of reading in the last few years. Calvino beautifully spins a tale of an imaginary encounter between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes all the cities of his long travels. Calvino's exquisite prose slowly reveals cities beyond imagination to the reader, all the while weaving subtle currents of longing and regret into the fabric of his tale. The novel shines magnificently as a study and examination of our strange relationship with memory. As Polo tells Khan, "It is not the voice that tells the story, but the ear." As Calvino also notes, the best way to really maintain and preserve our memories is to leave them be. Only in this way can we avoid the temptation of returning to them and likely distorting and warping them from their original state. As Calvino skillfully reveals the slow and hidden crumbling of our memories, you'll find yourself hypnotized and drawn into the amazing world he's created. Please do yourself a favor and buy a copy of this book NOW.
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Summary: A Fantasia of the Imagination
Review: Once more, I have grown in my appreciation and respect for Calvino's works. He writes using precise words and never quits until he has portrayed an image in sentences. He is inventive, an original. This short novel has incredible power not for plot, but for characterization, imagery, and sheer force contained in the words. The characterization works like a photographic negative. He never tells us of Genghis Khan or Marco Polo; no descriptions or personality traits given. What he uses is their ideas and the things that they talk of to describe what kind of people they are. Thus, it is through their impressions on the template that I could tell what kind of characters they are. That is good, confident writing, I think. The imagery is powerful too. Calvino strives to make his cities visible in the imagination. This is one trait that I think will make him be read years and years from now. Take your time with this novel. In fact, I don't think that it is possible to even race through it. It's shortness is misleading, it is very dense and laden with vitality and deserves to be savored in enjoyment and not raced through in the reading. But if you can slow down and enjoy it, I think you will find it to be well worth the effort.
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Summary: a magnificent novella
Review: Sublime beyond description.
I have loved this book for years. Like so many others, I stumbled into the arms of Calvino through "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller", a book at once beautiful, clever and maddening. And what an intriguing embrace it was. But this - this is truly extraordinary and any attempt to describe it would be utterly futile. I must have read it a dozen times or more, and yet every time I pick it up, it still gives me goosebumps.
Read it now.
Rating:
Summary: Invisible Cities
Review: Invisible Cities is, at its most basic, a constant dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan as Polo recounts his journeys throughout the lands and describes the cities that the Khan will never see himself. At its most complex, this book is about the make-up of our own lives, the level of insight wrapped around the fantastic cities is simply amazing. A recurring theme through the novel is that of the sadness associated with life, and the general melancholy awareness that afflicts any place. Octavia, the spider-web city, is a city hanging between two mountains, existing entirely through a system of webbing and nets. The inhabitants, Marco Polo writes, do not live in fear of their existence like other city-dwellers, for they know that the netting will only last so long. Almost every city carries with it a similar lesson, a similar warning, a similar metaphor. None of the cities are truly happy, their single exception serving not to highlight their uniqueness, but to instead show that where they are not strong, they are weak. Here, to show an example of the sheer originality and wonder of these cities, are some examples: A city replicated many times, and when the occupants become disillusioned with their jobs and wives, they all simply get up and move to the next city to take up new occupations, new wives or husbands and new lives, and the cycle begins anew, but the cit, of all the invisible cities, remains always the same. A city where there is nothing but the water plumbing making up the dwellings, and naked women bathe in bathtubs and showers suspended in the air by nothing but their piping's. To me, the point of this book was to highlight a good or a bad side to human life and embody this within a particular city. Then, each aspect can be examined and shown to be lacking, or sufficient, based entirely on its own merits. No single city could truly exist, but instead each aspect of the cities exist within those we live in today, and by isolating and examining these we can perhaps make our own lives - and the lives of others - better for it. The constant dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo serve only to reinforce this belief; the two men often speaking at each other in metaphors and life-lessons. In particular, the city of Eusapia is amazing, I won't describe it though, I'll just say that its description alone is worth the price of admission. This book gets my absolute highest recommendation.
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Summary: Invisible Calvino
Review: Gore Vidal, on the back cover of my copy (or the library's copy, to be more precise -- which was checked out under my friend Adan's account, because I couldn't prove that I'm a resident of San Francisco, which, I guess, I'm not - technically speaking, but still..) of *Invisible Cities* says something to the effect that a book's content is the most difficult thing to summarize, and that this book in particular presents a major challenge in that respect. And then, underneath that quote, is the unattributed summary of the book, which reads: "Italo Calvino's dazzling imagination and extraordinary intellegence combine here in an enchanting series of stories about the evolution of the universe. He makes characters out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and have a love life." Wow. I met Calvino through the book *On a Winter's Night, a Traveler*, which I fell in love with, and which pursuaded me to consider Calvino as one of my favorite authors - after reading just one book. When I searched for other books of his at the Richmond library in San Francisco, only *Invisible Cities*, a slim volume with an uninviting endorsement from Vidal and a bizarre, esoteric summary, was available. The first few pages revealed that the book is, in fact, about cities. Each city is granted two or three pages of text, then ostensibly forgotten. The cities are arranged in a formulaic system of chapters with serial titles - 9 chapters, each divided into a set of sub-chapters, each of which is devoted to one city, except the first and last subchapter of each chapter, which describes a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The subchapters are given generic sounding titles, such as "Cities and Memory," "Cities and Desire," or "Cities and the Sky." These titles are reused for different cities, creating an alliance of "Cities and Signs," or "Trading Cities." The structure of the Table of Contents reveals a lot about the nature of the book - the serialization of chapters, the lateral movement of serialed titles. It could be described as molecular, mathematical, organic: a pristine, crystalline, geometric construction of text. Wow. (the last sarcastic wow) I wasn't looking for a poetic novel about math. I wanted more Calvino, whoever he is. The unique but somewhat sterile organization of the book did not immediately appeal to me, but as I began to read, it became obvious that the book was about more than numbers and symmetry. These cities are kaleidoscopic: in each one, you can see your own city, every city you've ever seen, every city you've ever dreamed, nothing you've ever thought possible, localized systems of life and death, personalities built on an exaggerated human characteristic, and cities as living creatures. Midway through the book I thought I'd try and record some of the themes that I came across. Chapter 4-3: Parasitic city Chapter 4-2: Momentum of mentality; depression Chapter 4-1: Authority of Tradtion; Self-determination; delusion Chapter 4 (epilogue): probablity; infinity; random processes (1,000,000 monkeys typing for a million years) Chapter 8-5: Relativity Chapter 8-4: Black Hole Chapter 8-3: Expansion of the Universe Chapter 8-1: the Big Bang But not only does every city have a theme (and I'm sure you will find your own); there is an embedded lesson as well. *Invisible Cities* reads like a Physics book that has been absorbed by the Tao Te Ching. The lessons of life are offered in the complexity of nature - the universe has figured it out; all we need to do is listen. Wow.
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Summary: Make them endure, give them space.
Review: The first book I read by Calvino was If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, and I thought it was brilliant. I am equally floored by Invisible Cities. I'm not sure you could call it a novel -- there is a sense of movement through the work but it isn't narrative movement, it's the movement of ideas, an unfolding of Calvino's ways of characterising the nature of cities. The work is broken up into meditations that rarely extend for more than two pages; each discusses a city along a theme, describing how that city instantiates or represents a certain universal property that all cities share in to some degree. The beauty of the work comes from the way Calvino traces these themes: the tension between the way things are and the way we see or describe them; the tension between disparity and unity, or similarity and difference; the tension between progress and decay; between monotony and beauty. Almost every meditation took my breath away with the breadth of imagery and ideas that Calvino manages to evoke from such sparse prose (once again, William Weaver proves to be an utterly brilliant translator; I'm pretty sure he's responsible for the best translations of Svevo, as well, amongst others). The idea of the book itself is one thing; the execution is another. I'm going to find it hard not to continue through his works one by one from here. The final quote runs (no chance of giving anything away): "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what we already have, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Rating:
Summary: Brilliance
Review: Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that it is a sin to write a long book when the idea for it could be explained in a few pages. I don't entirely agree, and I doubt Italo Calvino did either, but from this book alone he certainly could have. The reason I say this is because Invisible Cities consists purely of ideas. There is no plot and only two major characters, who are really not characters so much as plot devices. (Perhaps not plot devices, since I just wrote that their is no plot, but I think you understand.) There is only a series of thoughts on perception, memory, time, and many other topics, explained through a series of descriptions of fantastical cities. Sometimes the meanings of the cities are clear, but most contain various degrees of enigmaticism. This book is short, but I don't recommend trying to read in one or a few days. It seems to work best if you read it a little at a time. My only real complaint with the book is that it seems to end arbitrarily rather than concluding. This is a brilliant book.
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